Once, when I did my friend's newspaper round, I got to a house where I opened the gate and saw a HUGE dog started charging toward me. I was paralysed by fright and saw my life pass before me. Just three metres away from me he was brought to an abrupt halt by the length of chain that connected him to a hook in the wall...
God is not the author of trouble and pain, it is a result of the brokenness of sin. But He does put a chain on trouble - He limits it. This does _not_ mean that we will never have trouble - Paul experienced it to the point of despair in Asia - but it God is able to transform our pain and sorrow.
If we rely on ourselves our heartaches will get the better of us. If we ignore God and try to "stiff upper lip" or "grin and bear it" through our troubles, we will run out of steam.
The lesson we have to learn in trouble is that God is bigger than our trouble and we have the comfort that even death is not final because God raises the dead.
When we learn to rely on God instead of ourselves, then trouble will not have the final say. BUT relying on God does not mean that we are passive and sit back waiting for God to do it all. We work hard, but we know deep down that God has trouble on a leash and we can get through it if we keep our eyes on Him.
God is not the author of trouble - it's us who broke the world - but He transforms our trouble so that even when trouble feels like a "sentence of death" we discover that by His miraculous intervention we receive infusions of courage, peace and love and we overcome our hardships!
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
